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Why (Some) People Believe Weird Things

grunion

Penultimate Amazing
grunion
Joined
Jul 28, 2003
Messages
11,494
(with apologies to Michael Shermer.)

I have some literate, intelligent and rather worldly friends that peddle some of the most credophilic nonsense known. Seriously. They will find deep meaning in a fortune cookie, and argue how it relates to their lives or accurately predicted some event. They will religiously read the horoscope in their daily paper, and on various web sites, and via various Facebook apps, all of them different, all of them banal, and all of them full of important advice about how they should approach their day. They will check books out of the library on how to read and interpret their tea leaves, and actually invest some energy in trying to do it. They will choose a place to live based upon some principles of Feng Shui that they read in a magazine article, spend serious dollars in remodeling to be in accord with the advice of another Feng Shui Master, and change their mind when they read a different article on the same topic. They will follow the teachings of one or another holy man who claims to be inspired by God, or may even claim to be God.

But they aren't stupid people.

In considering the notion of why an intelligent person would be so abysmally naive about certain things, I landed at the concept that "God brought them to it." They intellectually know that one or another interpretation about the position of the planets has no bearing on their personality, and couldn't possibly proscribe any specific behavior, but "the Lord works in mysterious ways," and God brought them to that horoscope. They know that tea leaf patterns are based upon the physical properties of the leaves, the cup, the water, the drinker, and a number of other measurable factors, but "everything has a reason," and so must the arrangement of the leaves on the bottom of the cup, because God brought them to the awareness of the ancient art of tea leaf reading and gave them the book that explains to them how to do it. They are fully aware that Feng Shui is entirely based upon ancient mythology, has no verifiable reason for working, and that no two practitioners will independently make the same recommendations, but the books and the philosophy and their awareness of it are "all part of God's plan" that we are on this earth to put into practice, regardless of whether it has any verifiable scientific merit. It seems that only the non-scientific claims are part of God's plan, only those that we are forced to take on faith, because verifiable claims are easy to follow, thus making them less valuable.

Of course this is all my interpretation of why they believe all this junk. And maybe it isn't that deep to you. Because I was raised athiest, it is a foreign concept to me, but as I age, and read more books, and speak with more different kinds of people, I start to imagine what it must feel like to believe in God. And so this justification for credophilia dawned on me, thus I thought it worthwhile enough to post here, and welcome your thoughts on the topic.
 
I think that is definitely one reason.

Another, and I only speak from personal experience, is that it is just more interesting/fun to believe in magic than it is to deny it. When I was a younger teen, I had been raised believing in God, but thought there were much more interesting and fun answers for how the universe came to exist. And I literally crafted my own theories, based off of hipppydippy newage sites I had found at the time.

I actually believed this stuff because it made sense to me. Stuff like after you die, you go to another level, and in this level you choose your next life.... There was no proof for that but it was far more appealing than what I was being taught in a Jehovah's Witness church. So I believed it.

It wasn't till later, when I started reading books on physics and psychology, that I took a hard look at what I believed and came to the conclusion that these beliefs had no grounding in reality, and were merely just preferential. Had I not come to that conclusion, I may have been hosting my own hippydippy newagey site instead of posting here.
 
I think that it's possible to be intelligent by the ordinary standard and still be a flake. It comes down to being sloppy over particular categories, especially with respect to the separation of subjectivity and objectivity. The former is supported by preference, the latter by evidence. When you get sloppiness here, you get a real mess.
 
People who belief in such things can be stupid on various fields if they can't put their ideas aside when dealing in the reality as we know it.
At the moment during weekendjob (still a student..) I have to work with a person who believes in paranormal forces, orbs, "energy shields" etc etc..

While many of you will probably view the person as "stupid"; I will wholeheartly disagree. From what I noticed, this person has valuable skills which require a decent amount of intelligence to make it trough life and be succesfull (at least when it comes to career, from what I gathered this persons private life is quite a mess..).

Point is, a belief shouldn't be considered as a measuring pole for intelligence.
Agreed that it is not an in-your-face-attitude wherein beliefs are being preached or other attempts being made to convert. There is an objective universe and a subjective. Objective being the one wherein interaction between people take place, phenomena are being measured, events/actions taking place,... and the subjective universe would be interpretations of the phenomena in the objective universe, beliefs and personal codes of moral.

I prefer to judge people on their accomplishments to enhance their position in life (or the objective universe in general) then to judge them on their beliefs and ideas. (Admitted I take the ideas and beliefs into account to say he/she is really that intelligent..).

On another note: why would people belief in things such as paranormal forces/entities/gods?
I'd say a lack of knowledge and the habit of explaining/ filling gaps with "nonsense" is much easier and less time-consuming then doing actual investigation. Less harder also..
Humans tend to be lazy in nature, and if they aren't they'll make sure finding technologies to make things easier.
 
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We all have small half-rational realities we jump into sometimes. We're standing between two furniture arrangements we can't decide between, and then we remember "Oh, mirror in front of bed is bad Feng Shui" and we go with the other one. Or we might like a principle from some silly system and keep a rule or two in mind.

I don't think my point came across, but I'm a rebel so I'm going to post anyway.
 
We all have small half-rational realities we jump into sometimes. We're standing between two furniture arrangements we can't decide between, and then we remember "Oh, mirror in front of bed is bad Feng Shui" and we go with the other one. Or we might like a principle from some silly system and keep a rule or two in mind.
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I'd go for the most functionable and durable one. But if they both are, I'd go for the esthetical most pleasing one..
Or we could react like Two-face from Batman and toss a coin..
 
It is human nature to seek an escape. Some resent their daily, boring routines so they find somewhat crazy hobbies or interests to tend to such an escape. Just like you may, perhaps, day dream or fantasize, they to do the same but through different means; beleiving in weird things.

my first post ever hehe (:
 
grunion said:
But they aren't stupid people.

....
It seems that only the non-scientific claims are part of God's plan, only those that we are forced to take on faith, because verifiable claims are easy to follow, thus making them less valuable.
...
Of course this is all my interpretation of why they believe all this junk. And maybe it isn't that deep to you. Because I was raised athiest, it is a foreign concept to me, but as I age, and read more books, and speak with more different kinds of people, I start to imagine what it must feel like to believe in God. And so this justification for credophilia dawned on me, thus I thought it worthwhile enough to post here, and welcome your thoughts on the topic.
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Nice post, there are many reasons why people do this, first off the brain looks for patterns and meanings and creates them all the time, so part of it is just the byproduct of that, then there is the whole emotions/intuition thing.

We often judge things at the preconscious level, you can train your self to make this conscious, like the 'ooky' signal that warns you a person is dangerous, or the way we interpret other people's emotions. These are patterns we use and learn to trust everyday sometimes it can be as mundane as finding parking spaces consistently in certain places or traffic patterns, judging the needs of others, but it can become very superstitious and invalid as well.

So pattern matching and confirmation bias, and then some comfort in the often overwhelming world.

Also sometimes being smart isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
 
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TubbaBlubba said:
We all have small half-rational realities we jump into sometimes. We're standing between two furniture arrangements we can't decide between, and then we remember "Oh, mirror in front of bed is bad Feng Shui" and we go with the other one. Or we might like a principle from some silly system and keep a rule or two in mind.

I don't think my point came across, but I'm a rebel so I'm going to post anyway.
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Right you are- Mirror goes on ceiling.:D
 
A while back I read an article on how smart people are better than not so smart people at convincing themselves of an irrational belief. It was found that smarter folks have better tools to rationalize their beliefs.
A friend of mine that I've know for over 30 years would be a good example of the smart person believing in weird things.
 
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I think part of the engine driving certain beliefs is a misapplication of the otherwise useful human predilection to join ideas together. We all are exposed to various disparate facts. The more intellectually curious of us tend to want to put those facts together into a coherent whole, to form a mental construct that for want of a better word most of us refer to as "understanding."

The problem is, not all the connections we build to join ideas together are valid. Sometimes we try to put together concepts that are simply unconnected, a process that leads to faulty thinking (and in extreme cases, obession and mental illness). Other times we sense that such connections must exist, but for whatever reason we fail to grasp what they actually are -- and thus when presented with a shortcut (for instance "God did it") we accept it into our thinking. Thus connection by connection, we construct a world view in which we have perfect confidence, for which we see proof everywhere, which for many people is perfectly workable, comforting, and satisfying.

Then someone comes along and insists "God didn't do it," and suddenly all those connections, and the belief system upon which they rest, are called into question -- more that that, accepting this one seemingly simple fact instantly puts everything at risk of total collapse, forcing the person to give up cherished ideas and basically start all over, in a world they may well find bereft of all former comforts. It takes rare intellectual courage to do that sort of thing, and many simply are not up to it and probably never will be.
 
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